MARK WEISS
            
            
THE MOMENTARY GODS

So many white birds on that flat blue water.

That
stone
that very
stone
that piece of water.

No pillow no
familiar place   a little money
to stay alive
for chance.
A thread of chances.

Fat water.

Cold   so
cold that the heart
itself as if it
beat in my hand
before it quit. 

Pithed.
Slit.
The small heart,
the frog
pinned to the board.

All the seed of the meadow.

All things that fly
linnet, cicada, grasshopper
that saws air

saws this!

swallows    the temple
exploding at every doorway.

So the narrative is the process of finding the god    let me tell
you what I saw there what spider
in the dank
shadow
beneath the cracked
pane etched
with dust and the little light
that made it 
through so many leaves
this blue darkness
and the reticent spotted bug    its web,
that it walks the way a pianist's hand
walks the music, a part
of its body, that
integral, 
the gestures of its many legs that form fabric
always the same
always the pattern    the light
fractured for it    complex
as the vision of its many eyes the matrix
of multiple vision. In and out of the light
the reassuring smells, the
tendrils at the doorway.
It was always moonlight there, it was always
about to happen.

The momentary gods wait
at the corner, and at the corners of days and nights. The momentary gods
are where you find them.

I named the sail
and it carried me.
..
.
FLOATING THROUGH BROOKLYN, AGAIN

A dog barks by the cemetery three blocks away, barks interminably in the 
         brittle darkness
his presence known
to whatever walks there. In my high bed with its books
and its amber lamp and its shelves
with more books
the great splintered night in the silent branches across the glass at my head 
         and the sad light
of the street-lamps on the paint-and-chrome bodies of cars. I have a geode
so large that I sleep there, so large
it becomes the street, so large with
its trees and stones, its stones   glowing, 
it seemed, from within.
a property of marble
or of white.

I have a bonnet made of blue
made of clouds
made of darkness. All night long
I float.

..
.

RIDDLE

I wear
the hair
of a sheep
and a dog
and the skin of a frog.
I open a hole in the ground
go down
come back
with a map.